Sending alerts to users has become increasingly popular with users who want updates and warnings regarding their personal information, associated assets or accounts. Originally, information, messages and alerts sent to users and businesses were delivered by traditional communication channels such as conventional paper-based mail or telephone calls. Such messages are frequently delivered at regular intervals in the form of periodic statements or monthly bills and often include recent activity as well as any miscellaneous announcements or updates. Although they are delivered on a regular basis, statements that are delivered by traditional paper-based mail systems inherently require entities, such as credit card issuers, to collect batches of information before it is sent out to a user or business. For example, credit card issuers traditionally send paper statements through the mail to credit card account holders at the end of a financial period, usually on a monthly basis. The credit card account activity included in the monthly statements is usually days, if not weeks, old due to the delay caused by the generation and delivery of the paper statements. While the information in the monthly statements may be useful, delays in the dissemination of the information for some period of time while the information is collected into a batch can be undesirable in trying to deliver critical or time sensitive information to users.
For instance, if an unauthorized user obtained a user's credit card or credit card number and makes unauthorized purchases, the user would not be alerted to this fact until he or she received and reviewed the monthly statements at a much later time. Some credit card issuers have started to send alerts regarding individual transactions via regular mail, however, due to the delay in generating and delivering paper-based alerts, the unauthorized user would still have ample opportunity to make multiple unauthorized purchases before the user was alerted by the information in the paper-based alert. In addition, there is no way for the alerting entity to cost-effectively or practically confirm delivery of the paper-based alert to the user.
To increase the speed and reliability with which users are alerted to suspicious or potentially fraudulent use of user account or identity information, some entities, such as credit card issuers, offer telephone notification services to contact the user whenever suspicious activity is detected. In such systems, a human operator or an automated system will call the user to alert him or her whenever suspicious activity is discovered in a near to real-time manner. Although such telephone alert systems are effective at quickly delivering alerts to users, they are resource intensive; requiring either many telephone operators or complex automated telephone dialers with access to many relatively expensive telephone lines. As such, telephone alert systems are effectively not scalable or practical for entities that need to service and send alerts to large numbers of users or businesses.
As described above, there is a need for a timely, cost-effective, reliable and scalable solution for delivering alerts to large numbers of users regarding quickly produced alerts for vast amounts of user activity and data. Embodiments of the present invention address this and other needs.